The Wapshot Chronicle

by John Cheever

  But her steps slowed as she approached the house. Her family of phantom children was scattered and she could not call them back again. Her period was only seven days late and her pregnancy might not be a fact. She ate a peanut-butter sandwich and a wedge of pecan pie. She missed New York and thought again that Remsen Park was an unfriendly place. Late in the day the doorbell rang and a vacuum-cleaner salesman stood in the door. “Well now, come right in,” Betsey said cheerfully. “You come right in. I don’t have a vacuum cleaner now and I don’t have the money to buy one at the moment. We only just moved from New York but I’m going to buy one as soon as I have the money and perhaps if you’ve got some new attachments I might buy one of those because I’m determined to buy a new vacuum cleaner sooner or later and I’ll need the attachments anyhow. I’m pregnant now and a young mother can’t do all that housework without the proper equipment; all that stooping and bending. Would you like a cup of coffee? I imagine you must get tired and footsore going around with that heavy bag all day long. My husband’s in the Taping Department and they work him hard but it’s a different kind of tiredness, it’s just in the brain, but I know what it is to have tired feet.”

  The salesman opened his sample case in the kitchen before he drank his coffee and sold Betsey two attachments and a gallon of floor wax. Then, because he was tired, and this was his last call, he sat down. “I was living alone in New York all the time my husband was in the Pacific,” Betsey said, “and we just moved out here and of course I was happy to make the move but I don’t find it a very friendly place. I mean I don’t think it’s friendly like New York. In New York I had lots of friends. Of course I was mistaken, once. I was mistaken in my friends. You know what I mean? There were these people named Hansen who lived right down the hall from me. I thought they were my real friends. I thought at last I’d found some lifelong friends. I used to see them every day and every night and she wouldn’t buy a dress without asking me about it and I loaned them money and they were always telling me how much they loved me, but I was deceived. Sad was the day of reckoning!” The light in the kitchen was dim and Betsey’s face was drawn with feeling. “They were hypocrites,” she said. “They were liars and hypocrites.”

  The salesman packed his things and went away. Coverly came home at six. “Hello, sugar,” he said. “Why sit in the dark?”

  “Well, I think I’m pregnant,” Betsey said. “I guess I’m pregnant. I’m seven days late and this morning I felt sort of funny, dizzy and sick.” She sat on Coverly’s lap and put her head against his. “I think it’s going to be a boy. That’s what it feels like to me. Of course there’s no point in counting your chickens before your eggs are hatched but if we do have a baby one of the things I want to buy is a nice chair because I’m going to breast feed this baby and I’d like to have a nice chair to sit in when I nurse him.”

  “You can buy a chair,” Coverly said.

  “Well, I saw a nice chair in the furniture center a couple of days ago,” Betsey said, “and after supper why don’t we walk around the corner and look at it? I haven’t been out of the house all day and a little walk would be good for you, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it be good for you to stretch your legs?”

  After supper they took their walk. A fresh wind was blowing out of the north—straight from St. Botolphs—and it made Betsey feel vigorous and gay. She took Coverly’s arm and at the corner, under the fluorescent street lamp, he bent down and gave her a French kiss. Once they got to the shopping center Betsey wasn’t able to concentrate on her chair. Every suit, dress, fur coat and piece of furniture in the store windows had to be judged, its price and way of life guessed at and some judgment passed as to whether or not it should enter Betsey’s vision of happiness. Yes, she said to a plant stand, yes, yes to a grand piano, no to a breakfront, yes to a dining-room table and six chairs, as thoughtfully as St. Peter sifting out the hearts of men. At ten o’clock they walked home. Coverly undressed her tenderly and they took a bath together and went to bed for she was his potchke, his fleutchke, his notchke, his motchke, his everything that the speech of St. Botolphs left unexpressed. She was his little, little squirrel.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  During the three weeks before their marriage, Moses and Melissa deceived Justina so successfully that it pleased the old lady to watch them say good night to one another at the elevator and she spoke several times at dinner of Melissa’s part of the house as that part of the house that Moses had never seen. Moses’s training as a mountain climber kept him from tiring in his nightly trip over the roofs but one evening, when they had wine with dinner and he was hurried, he tripped over the wire once more and sprawled, full-length, on the slates, cutting his chest. Then, with his skin smarting, a deep physical chagrin took hold of him and he discovered in himself a keen dislike of Clear Haven and all its antics and a determination to prove that the country of love was not bizarre; and he consoled himself with thinking that in a few days he would be able to put a ring on Melissa’s finger and enter her room at the door. She had, for some reason, made him promise not to urge her to leave Clear Haven, but he felt that she would change her mind by autumn.

  On the eve of his wedding Moses walked up from the station, carrying a rented cutaway in a suitcase. On the drive he met Giacomo, who was putting light bulbs into the fixtures along the drive. “She’sa two hundred feefty light bulbs!” Giacomo exclaimed. “She’sa likea Saint’s Day.” It was dusk when the lights gave Clear Haven the cheerful look of a country fair. When Moses took the general up the old man wanted to give him a drink and some advice, but he excused himself and started over the roofs. He was covering the stretch from the chapel to the clock tower when he heard Justina’s voice, quite close to him. She was at D’Alba’s window. “I can’t see anything, Niki,” she said, “without my glasses.”

  “Shhh,” D’Alba said, “he’ll hear you.”

  “I wish I could find my glasses.”

  “Shhhh.”

  “Oh, I can’t believe it, Niki,” Justina said. “I can’t believe that they’d disappoint me.”

  “There he goes, there he goes,” D’Alba said as Moses, who had been crouching in the dark, made for the shelter of the clock tower.

  “Where?”

  “There, there.”

  “Get Mrs. Enderby,” Justina said. “Get Mrs. Enderby and have her call Giacomo and tell him to bring his crow gun.”

  “You’ll kill him, Justina.”

  “Any man who does such a thing deserves to be shot.”

  What Moses felt while he listened to their talk was extreme irritation and impatience, for having started on his quest he did not have the reserve to brook interruptions, or at least interruptions from Justina and the count. He was safe in the shelter of the tower and while he stood there he heard Mrs. Enderby and then Giacomo join the others.

  “She’sa nobody there,” Giacomo said.

  “Well, fire anyway,” Justina said. “If there’s someone there you’ll frighten them. If there isn’t you won’t do any harm.”

  “She’sa no good, Missa Scaddon,” Giacomo said.

  “You fire, Giacomo,” Justina said. “You either fire or hand me that gun.”

  “Wait until I get something to cover my ears,” Mrs. Enderby said. “Wait until …”

  Then there was the ear-clapping blast of Giacomo’s crow gun and Moses heard the shot strike on the roof around him and in the distance the ring of breaking glass.

  “Oh why do I feel so sad?” Justina asked plaintively. “Why do I feel so sad?” D’Alba shut the window and when his lights were turned on and his pink curtains drawn, Moses continued his climb. Melissa ran to him weeping when he swung down onto the balcony of her room. “Oh my darling, I thought they’d shot you,” she cried. “Oh my sweetheart, I thought you were dead.”

  Coverly could not get away from Remsen Park, but Leander and Sarah came to the wedding. They must have left St. Botolphs at dawn. Emmet Cavis drove them in his funeral car. Moses was delighted to see them a
nd proud, for they played out their parts with the wonderful simplicity and grace of country people. As for the invitations to the wedding—Justina had dusted off her old address book, and poor Mrs. Enderby, wearing a hat and a scrap of veiling, had addressed the four hundred envelopes and come to the dinner table for a week with ink-stained fingers and an ink-spotted blouse, her eyes red from checking Justina’s addresses against a copy of the Social Register that could have been printed no later than 1918. Giacomo mailed the cards with his blessing (“She’sa lovely, Missa Scaddon”) and the cards were delivered to brownstones in the East Fifties that had been transformed from homesteads into showrooms for Italian neckties, art galleries, antique dealers, walk-up apartments and offices of such organizations as the English-Speaking Union and the Svenskameri-kanska Förbundet. Further uptown and further east the invitations were received by the tail-coated doormen of eighteen- and twenty-story apartment buildings where the names of Justina’s friends and peers struck a spark in no one’s memory. Up Fifth Avenue invitations were delivered to more apartment houses as well as to institutes of costume design, slapdash rooming houses, finishing schools and to the offices of the American Irish Historical Society and the Sino-American Amity, Inc. They were exposed to the sootfall among other uncollected mail (old bills from Tiffany and copies of The New Yorker) in houses with boarded-up front doors. They lay on the battered tables of progressive kinder-gartens where children could be heard laughing and weeping and they fell into the anonymous passageways of houses that, built with an open hand, had been remodeled with a tight one and where people cooked their dinners in the morning room and the library. An invitation was received at the Jewish Museum, at the downtown branch of Columbia University, at the French and the Jugoslavian consulates, at the Soviet Delegation to the United Nations, at several fraternity houses, actors’ clubs, bridge clubs, milliners and dressmakers. Further afield invitations were received by the Mother Superiors of the Ursuline Order, the Poor Clares and the Sisters of Mercy. They were received by the overseers of Jesuit schools and retreats, Franciscan Fathers, Cowley Fathers, Paulists and Misericordia Sisters. They were delivered to mansions remodeled into country clubs, boarding schools, retreats for the insane, alcohol cures, health farms, wildlife sanctuaries, wallpaper factories, drafting rooms and places where the aged and the infirm waited sniffily for the angel of death in front of their television sets. When the bells of Saint Michael’s rang that afternoon there were no more than twenty-five people in the body of the church and two of these were rooming-house proprietors who had come out of curiosity. When the time came Moses said the words loudly and with a full heart. After the ceremony most of the guests returned to Clear Haven and danced to the music of a phonograph. Sarah and Leander performed a stately waltz and said good-by. The maids filled the old champagne bottles with cheap sauterne and when the summer dusk had fallen and all the chandeliers were lighted the main fuse blew once more. Giacomo repaired it and Moses went upstairs and entered Melissa’s room by the door.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The rocket-launching sites at Remsen Park were fifteen miles to the south and this presented a morale problem for there were hundreds or thousands of technicians like Coverly who knew nothing about the beginnings or the ends of their works. The administration met this problem by having public rocket launchings on Saturday afternoons. Transportation was furnished so that whole families could pack their sandwiches and beer and sit in bleachers to hear the noise of doom crack and see a fire that seemed to lick at the vitals of the earth. These firings were not so different from any other kind of picnic, although there were no softball games or band concerts; but there was beer to drink and children strayed and were lost and the jokes the crowd made while they waited for an explosion that was calculated to pierce the earth’s atmosphere were very human. Betsey loved all of this, but it hardly modified her feeling that Remsen Park was unfriendly. Friends were important to her and she said so. “I just come from a small town in Georgia,” she said, “and it was a very friendly place and I just believe in stepping up and making friends. After all, we only pass this way once.” As often as she made the remark about passage, it had not lost its strength. She was born; she would die.

  Her overtures to Mrs. Frascati continued to be met with sullen smiles and she invited the woman in the next house—Mrs. Galen—in for a cup of coffee, but Mrs. Galen had several college degrees and an air of elegance and privilege that made Betsey uneasy. She felt that she was being scrutinized and scrutinized uncharitably and saw there was no room for friendship here. She was persistent and finally she hit on it. “I met the liveliest, nicest, friendliest woman today, honey,” she told Coverly when she kissed him at the door. “Her name’s Josephine Tellerman and she lives on M Circle. Her husband’s in the drafting room and she says she’s lived on nearly every rocket-launching reservation in the United States and she’s just full of fun and her husband’s nice too and she comes from a nice family and she asked us why didn’t we come over some night and have a drink.”

  Betsey loved her neighbor. This simple act of friendship brought her all the delights and hazards of love. Coverly knew how dim and senseless Circle K had seemed to her until the moment when she met Josephine Tellerman. Now he was prepared to hear about Mrs. Tellerman for weeks and months. He was glad. Betsey and Mrs. Tellerman would do their shopping together. Betsey and Mrs. Tellerman would be on the telephone every morning. “My friend Josephine Tellerman tells me that you have some very nice lamb chops,” she would tell them at the butcher. “My friend Josephine Tellerman recommended you to me,” she would tell them at the laundry. Even the vacuum-cleaner salesman, ringing her doorbell at the end of a hard day, would find her changed. She would be friendly enough, but she would not open the door. “Oh, hello,” she would say. “I’d like to talk with you but I’m very sorry I don’t have the time this afternoon. I’m expecting a telephone call from my friend Josephine Tellerman.”

  The Wapshots went over to the Tellermans’ for a drink one night and Coverly found them friendly enough. The Tellermans’ house was furnished exactly like the Wapshots’, including the Picasso over the mantelpiece. In the living room the women talked about curtains, and Coverly and Max Tellerman talked about cars in the kitchen while Max made the drinks. “I’ve been looking at cars,” Max said, “but I decided I wouldn’t buy one this year. I have to cut down. And I don’t really need a car. You see I’m sending my kid brother through college. My folks have split up and I feel pretty responsible for this kid. I’m all he’s got. I worked my way through college—Jesus, I did everything—and I don’t want him to go through that rat race. I want him to take it easy for four years. I want him to have everything he needs. I want him to feel that he’s as good as the next fellow for a few years. …” They went back into the living room, where the women were still talking about curtains. Max showed Coverly some photographs of his brother and went on talking about him and at half-past ten they said good night and walked home.

  Betsey was no gardener but she bought some canvas chairs for the back yard and some wooden lattice to conceal the garbage pail. They could sit there on summer nights. She was pleased with what she had done and one summer night the Tellermans came over to christen—as Betsey said—the back yard with rum. It was a warm night and most of their neighbors were in their yards. Josie and Betsey were talking about bedbugs, cockroaches and mice. Coverly was speaking affectionately of West Farm and the fishing there. He wasn’t drinking himself and he disliked the smell of rum that came from the others, who were drinking a lot. “Drink, drink,” Josie said. “It’s that kind of a night.”

  It was that kind of a night. The air was hot and fragrant and from the kitchen, where he mixed the drinks, Coverly looked out of the window into the Frascatis’ back yard. There he saw the young Frascati girl in a white bathing suit that accentuated every line of her body but the crease in her buttocks. Her brother was spraying her gently with a garden hose. There was no horseplay, there were no outcries,
there was no sound at all while the young man dutifully sprayed his beautiful sister. When Coverly had mixed the drinks he carried them out. Josie had begun to talk about her mother. “Oh, I wish you people could have met my mother,” she said. “I wish you kids could have met my mother.” When Betsey asked Coverly to fill the glasses once more he said they were out of rum. “Run down to the shopping center and get a bottle, honey,” Josie said. “It’s that kind of a night. We only live once.”

  “We only pass this way once,” Betsey said.

  “I’ll get some,” Coverly said.

  “Let me, let me,” Max said. “Betsey and I’ll go.” He pulled Betsey out of her chair and they walked together toward the shopping center. Betsey felt wonderful. It’s that kind of a night, was all she could think to say, but the fragrant gloom and the crowded houses where the lights were beginning to go out and the noise of sprinklers and the snatches of music all made her feel that the pain of traveling and moving and strangeness and wandering was ended and that it had taught her the value of permanence and friendship and love.

  Everything delighted her then—the moon in the sky and the neon lights of the shopping center—and when Max came out of the liquor store she thought what a distinguished, what an athletic and handsome man he was. Walking home he gave Betsey a long, sad look, put his arms around her and kissed her. It was a stolen kiss, Betsey thought, and it was that kind of a night, it was the kind of a night where you could steal a kiss. When they got back to Circle K, Coverly and Josie were in the living room. Josie was still talking about her mother. “Never an unkind word, never a harsh look,” she was saying. “She used to be quite a pianist. Oh, there was always a big gang at our house. On Sunday nights we all used to gather around the piano and sing hymns you know and have a wonderful time.” Betsey and Max went to the kitchen to make drinks. “She was unhappy in her marriage,” Josie was saying. “He was a real sonofabitch, there’s no two ways about it, but she was philosophical, that was the secret of her success; she was philosophical about him and just from hearing her talk you’d think she was the happiest married woman in the world but he was …” “Coverly,” Betsey screamed. “Coverly, help.”